We are talking about the northern part of the “museum quarter” of the Tretyakov gallery in Lavrushinsky lane, facing the Kadashevskaya embankment and the Kremlin. The project of the new museum building was developed by Mosproekt-4 in 2003-2007. In December 2012, the construction tender was won by Zarubezhproekt (see a rather snide, but detailed article about this in Slon.ru), which is now acting as a customer of the competition. Competitors must propose a new facade solution; 2.5 months are allotted for work, i.e. results are expected to be available by mid-August. The building should be completed by 2018, the cost of construction several years ago was determined at 4.7 billion rubles, the money is planned to be allocated from the state budget.
There are seven participants in the competition:
- TPO "Reserve"
- JSB "Tsimailo, Lyashenko and Partners"
- UNK project
- JSB "Ostozhenka"
- SPEECH
- AB "TOTEMENT / PAPER"
- A. V. Bokov
In parallel, an open competition will be held on the same topic among students of the Moscow Architectural Institute. According to Sergei Kuznetsov, it is likely that the winners of this competition will be integrated into the team working on the project. (UPD: later it turned out that the student competition had already passed. We probably misunderstood what was said at the briefing. We apologize to those who were misled through our fault. The full video of the briefing can be seen below.)
Yesterday, the author of the existing project, the head of Mosproekt-4, Andrey Bokov, the chief architect of Moscow, Sergei Kuznetsov, and the director of the State Tretyakov gallery, Irina Lebedeva, held a press briefing at which they spoke about their vision of the competition. Here you can see the video of the briefing:
According to Irina Lebedeva, the participants were given a very difficult task - to propose a new one, integrating into the existing (and having received all the approvals) project, the implementation of which has already begun: “a wall has been made in the ground, encircling the entire construction site,” see the broadcast from the webcam from views of the construction site. The gallery, according to the director's figurative expression, started from Tretyakov's own house, “developed like a sprout”, overgrowing with wings (the history of growth can be studied using a brochure on the museum's website and a flash-video there).
The new building houses a depository, workshops, a graphics room and other exhibition halls, as well as premises necessary for the museum's cultural and educational activities. The new building and its parts, says the director of the State Tretyakov Gallery, have many requirements, for example, painting workshops need a lot of light and large windows, and workshops working with graphics need small windows facing north. Therefore, the volume of the case, according to Irina Lebedeva, turned out to be large and monolithic. According to the director, the architects are faced with the task of visually dismembering this volume so that it does not overwhelm the rest of the buildings of the museum quarter.
Answering the question about what exactly did not suit the management in the corrected project, Irina Lebedeva said that, firstly, representatives of the then city authorities took an active part in its development, primarily Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who was the chairman of the museum's board of trustees. In particular, this is why the project turned out to be "morally obsolete": if the Corps of Engineers of the 1980s was "more stylized, then here we again make an almost direct quote from the old corpus." In addition, the previous project assumed layering, which is inconvenient for the museum in terms of function.
From the story of Irina Lebedeva, some details also became known, for example, that in the assignment for the design of buildings built in 1985–1995, it was determined, among other things, the need to integrate new buildings into the ensemble of existing buildings - and to emphasize their differences. In other words, the new buildings had to be similar and not similar at the same time, for example, in the assignment it was written that the color of their walls should be different from the historical facades. At that time, Mosproekt-4 was already involved in the project, which has been working on expanding the State Tretyakov Gallery for about 30 years,”added the words of the museum director Andrei Bokov:“The Finns were invited and they made a cube in prefabricated reinforced concrete, because something else was not allowed then. Then they made the Corps of Engineers. The next stage was the reconstruction of the Shchusev building, which was almost unnoticed outwardly, but very serious. And Shchusev worked on the project of the building overlooking the Kadashevskaya embankment before the war."
Irina Lebedeva called the current competition a "blitz-competition of ideas", Andrey Bokov defined it as an examination, and the participants called it experts: "… the very fact of participation in this examination should become a serious fact in the biography of each of you," said Andrey Bokov, referring to to the participants of the competition. He promised “an extremely respectful attitude towards all those proposals that will be made. But the main goal will not only be to speak, but also to get the result. On the one hand, we are interested in expressing our idea of the correct architecture. On the other hand, we need to solve a specific problem. And in solving this problem, I think we should use the tools we understand and know. If there is one winner, one leader, "…" in the competition, then on the basis of this proposal plus the base that I will show you, a task will be built to correct the solution of the facades. It will be signed by the chief architect, the gallery and the client, who will be fully responsible for the budget and timing. “…” Then we, together with the finalist or finalists, make the project stage. We show it to the chief architect, gallery, it goes to the expert examination and then we make the facade system ourselves or order it to the contractor. There will be four finalists - great. I will only welcome a large number of productive, high quality, impressive ideas and images. There will be one - well, maybe then all this will be easier. Once again: I will be very grateful to each of you for your honest, frank statement on the topic."
Sergei Kuznetsov called the competition “rather quick in order to identify an idea that can be integrated into an existing practically finished project,” and defined its task as complex and responsible (the facade overlooks the Kremlin).
In response to a journalist's question about why the form of a closed competition was chosen, Sergei Kuznetsov defined this competition as “rather semi-closed”: “We selected participants using the method of third-party consultations and polling a fairly large number of teams. The task is not at all typical, I must say that not everyone agreed to participate. A choice was made from those architects with whom we managed to achieve mutual understanding and motivation, because people should be interested in the task. We did not try to persuade anyone. Those who are really interested in this task agreed. Although I certainly agree that a competition with an open phase is the most interesting and productive thing that can be, I must say that the time factor did not allow us to turn around. The fact that this is not a new project, but an adjustment, imposes its own nuances, plus deadlines. It seems to me that in such a difficult situation, this is the best option for finding solutions,”concluded Sergei Kuznetsov.
The winner of the competition will be determined by the Board of Trustees and the Director of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the architectural council, according to Sergei Kuznetsov, will offer its assistance, the form of which will be determined in the near future: projects.
